The End of the Day

by Bill Clegg

  Dana had convinced Hap to give her back her briefcase and all the documents inside. She almost felt sorry for him that all it took was a promise to return the originals once she’d made copies for herself. At first, she wasn’t clear why she wanted all of it out of his hands—it was more of an urgent feeling than a reason—but in the hours that followed their meeting, she recognized that if she did end up telling Jackie anything, she might need some kind of proof. And it didn’t escape her that if Hap somehow reached her first, without the contents of the briefcase he’d have little more than a wild story. In exchange she told him everything she knew of how he came to be, and when he asked who and where everyone who was still alive was, she wrote down Jackie and Lupita’s names and the names of the towns they lived in on an old florist’s card she’d fished from her wallet. She told him that the choice to contact his birth mother and the family of his father was, of course, his, but that he should be aware that there would be agony for everyone involved, that these were people who’d long since moved on with their lives. She didn’t know if this were true of Lupita, only what she’d seen in photographs. But she’d survived. And that was something.

  Dana notices the banging has stopped just as Jackie sees her. Without realizing it, she has shuffled and readjusted her place against the brick and inadvertently progressed, in fractions of inches, out from the shadow to where she stands now, half-lit under the pitiless floodlights.

  Me first, Jackie says as they make eye contact. Dana braces for a half-century of rage and judgment, but when Jackie speaks, it is softly and not the high ragged holler she expects. She gestures to the house, the grounds, the woods. Despite all this, she says, more bewildered than angry. You wanted what I had. And you took it. Or at least you tried to.

  Dana steps closer, fully lit now. You’re right, she says without defense or qualification, That’s what I came to say. Whatever else is true, and whatever else I might say to explain, you’re right and I’m sorry I don’t have any explanation other than… She pauses, clears her throat, and as she does recognizes that though she’d come back to Wells with much more to tell Jackie, what she is saying now is the part that is hers alone, and true: I was jealous. And angry. I loved you… more than you knew, I think… and you… you had this life beginning. I didn’t belong in it anymore. I was wrong. I didn’t think any of it through.

  Jackie appears disappointed. She shakes her head and mutters something unintelligible while she refastens her coat, which had come loose banging her fist against the window. She crosses her arms at her chest and narrows her eyes as if she’s identified a double meaning or trap in Dana’s words. She draws a breath before speaking again. Her voice is exhausted, final.

  It was a long time ago… and none of it matters. We were friends and then we weren’t. I may not know everything… but I know that I wasn’t the one responsible. You may have all the details and secrets to share now, but I wasn’t interested in them then and I’m not interested now. Keep your briefcase and your papers. They have nothing to do with me. It’s been… Jackie pauses, looks up at the house and out across the lawn. She does not meet Dana’s eye again as she turns to leave. I’m sorry you came all this way.

  As Jackie starts toward the driveway, Dana remembers the first time her friend told her about Floyd. It was years before he’d ever noticed her, when Jackie was in eighth grade and he was a freshman in high school. He was the older brother of a girl in her class, the perfect boy, was the phrase she used. She’d never spoken to him, but she’d decided he was perfect. Her conviction was as clear and unyielding then as the line she drew to keep Dana away from the life she’d begin with him later, as clear as the line she was drawing now. Dana can feel the sting of once again being put in her place, banished; but as Jackie walks away, she sees her shoulders hunch and shiver, her hands knot together to stay warm. Disarmed, Dana calls out, Can I at least walk you to your car? Jackie does not respond as she keeps walking.

  No more words, no more anything. I just want… It’s late and cold and… I don’t want you to be out there… alone… No one should… As Dana’s last words leave her mouth, Jackie reaches the place where the driveway meets the road. She stops, appears to bend slightly at the waist, but does not turn around. Lit from behind by the house and on either side by half a dozen or so floodlights arranged in the trees and along the stonewall, she looks momentarily confused, and tired, and Dana begins to move toward her. But before she takes a full step, Jackie straightens from her slouch, pulls the collar of her coat up toward her neck, and for the last time, she leaves.

  Dana watches the bright, empty driveway like the last person in a movie theater who stays long after the final credit has rolled to the top of the screen and the music has ended. Crickets saw the night air and for the first time since she came outside she can hear the river’s low murmur at the bottom of the lawn. She hears something else there, too, but cannot place it. A high chirp, a quick whistle. She looks away from the house, in the direction of the sound, but there is only the lit grass, the edge of the woodline. She hears the sound again, but now it’s behind her. Jackie, she thinks, her blood racing. The whistle a signal of willingness, a peace offering. Dana spins around, certain for a few seconds she will see her old friend, but there is no one there, just the bright and empty driveway. The floodlights before and behind her seem to glow brighter.

  Turn them off, she screams, edging back to the house. She starts to call Marcella but quickly remembers where she is. She shouts for Philip, but no one comes. Then Kenny. Again, nothing. Just the sounds of frogs and crickets and rushing water. She’ll turn the lights off herself, she decides as she raises her boot to ascend the portico stairs, but before her heel touches down she realizes that she has no idea where any of the switches are. Her hands begin to shake and she stills them by holding onto the paint-flaked railing. She ransacks her memory but dozens of houses and apartments flash before her, hundreds of light switches and lamps, driveways and entrance halls. She glides down, slowly, almost imperceptibly, until she is fully seated on the bottom stair. Momentarily she has no idea where she is or why her hands, off the railing now, are tight at her sides, clenched into fists. And then she remembers. The switches. She needs to find the light switches. Their discovery the only escape. If she knew where they were, if she only knew, she’d flick each one off, one-by-one, kill every light inside and outside the house. She’d plunge the whole goddamned place into darkness.

  Floyd

  He hadn’t planned on being gone long. Just enough time to catch a glimpse of Lupita and get back to Jackie and Amy, while there was still enough light to get down the hill. Before the fireworks that they would watch from their blanket began. This is what he believed was achievable when he walked up the path from the parking lot with someone he barely knew, someone who’d never before been friendly. His impression of Dana until now was that she had no interest in him, nor in anyone else from Wells who wasn’t Jackie. Today, she’d greeted him warmly, waved, and called him toward her with an encouraging smile.

  But it’s dark now, and he’s alone and on the ground. Slowly, he stands. Brushes off the pine needles from his jeans and as he does he yawns. A primal flexing of a set of tiny, little-used muscles that extend from the back of his throat, behind his ears, down his neck and out through arms and chest. The unexpected spasm possesses and passes through him in an instant, like a fast, unexpected wave overwhelming a small boat, or an exorcism. He turns away from the dark cabin, its blue door closed. Voices rattle the windows. Someone shouts and he begins to walk, avoiding the wobbly rocks that form a circle around the smoldering campfire. Above him the stars dot a dim constellation, scarce lights from the highest ceiling. There is no moon and the trailhead is not visible at the edge of the clearing. His head pounds. Had he been drinking? Did he fall and hit his head? He rubs his face and neck and blinks his eyes to see. Down the hill the sound of a giant boulder dropped from a great height is followed by a quick, faraway whistle. Then another. And another. It’
s only when a few stray green and red lights shoot above the treetops does he remember what day it is. Where has he been? Why is it dark? He has no answers, yet he’s sure he must keep moving. He steps more quickly across the clearing, and above him the sky brightens with Christmas tree colors—red and gold and green and white—the suddenly loud world clapping him on and whistling him forward. The lawn ends and he hears the pop and click of a lesser burst behind him. He turns and sees the cabin lit momentarily from within. There are no lamps on but with each electric pop a small explosion of silver light guts the place, reveals for a split-second the skeleton of openings—windows and door and cracks along the roofline. He does not understand what he sees or hears there but knows he must turn his back to it. The pounding in his head amplifies as the frequency of detonating fireworks accelerates to such a level that it sounds like a house burning, beams and boards popping as sap and air explode, the structure they make collapsing.

  He approaches where he thinks the trail begins but sees only trees and bramble. Above him a tinsel sky, behind him murky strangeness, and in between a slowly emerging memory. He lurches into the woods, where he stumbles over roots and stumps, scrapes his hands on sharp bark as he falls. He scrambles to his feet and searches the dark for something familiar—car lights below, the edge of the trail—anything that will lead him back to what he hopes is still home.

  Jackie

  The walk from Edgeweather to the house she grew up in is still one she can make in the dark. As the lights of the big house recede behind her, Jackie wonders how many Friday nights she watched this road from her living room window, waiting for the Gosses’ black Town Car to appear from the city. She’d leave her green knapsack packed with toothbrush, nightgown and changes of underwear next to the front door and when the car passed by, she’d throw it over her shoulder, call out to her parents who were by then in bed, and run out into the night to see her best friend. On most weekends, she wouldn’t return home until Sunday evening. On the slow walks back she’d sing the latest song they’d blared on the record player in their third floor bedroom, singing along, again and again, until they knew all the words. The one she remembers now is “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a song she hasn’t thought of in a long time but seems appropriate as she walks in the dark wood. Softly, she sings the opening lyrics, In the jungle, the mighty jungle… which distracts her from the unsettling memory of Dana’s stumbling from the shadows alongside the house minutes before. Jackie was thrown by how desperate she appeared, how vulnerable. And by her remorseful words, the only ones she’d spoken to her today that sounded true. What throws her most now is how sorry she feels for Dana and realizes that if she had simply come to her with an apology that did not attempt to justify her actions or indict anyone else, she would have had very little armor to reject it. Instead, she delivered a briefcase full of riddles and an ominous note to her doorstep and, later, in the first minutes of their reunion, disparaged Floyd and told her that she both knew nothing and was responsible for everything. She can’t help but feel foolish to still be surprised, even disappointed, that after all these years, Dana was exactly who she’d always been. Someone who wanted what was not hers, and who, if given the chance, would take or destroy everything that mattered.

  Standing next to her old mailbox, Jackie squints to see the only other house she’s ever lived in, the house that was now Dana’s. But there is only the murky suggestion of a roofline above lifeless and empty space. Her eyes land on nothing. She steps in the direction of her car, and as she does feels an old heaviness return. It weighs on her shoulders and back, presses against her chest. She remembers it arriving the week after Floyd died, and again after each of her parents died; and once, long before—the very first time—when it felt like the end of everything. By now she knows there is nothing she can do to keep it from coming—it will show up, settle in, and stay for as long as it needs to. But in time, gradually, its pressure will lighten, and as with every person and every experience that had come before, some part of it would always be with her.

  * * *

  To the car from the picnic blanket and back should take no more than ten minutes. Ten minutes each way, Jackie figures, one or two minutes to pull out the bag of diapers and jug of iced tea from the trunk. It’s possible he ran into someone. Probably Tommy Hall and his cronies from the volunteer fire department. They loved to keep Floyd away from Jackie as long as possible, always pushing him to have a few beers after they’d finished work in the afternoons. Or it could be his sister Hannah or the cousins she ran around with. Everyone in Wells came to Hatch Pond for the Fourth. The only people she knew wouldn’t be here now were her parents, who never came. They were shy and avoided the big town gatherings like this. You’d never run into them at the pancake breakfasts and spaghetti dinners to raise money for the volunteer fire department, or find them sitting in the bleachers at a football game at the high school. She pictured them at home now, watching the evening news, frowning at the coverage of the gathered masses camped out all day along the East River in New York City to get a good view of the fireworks.

  She knew where her parents were, but not Floyd. After calculating time to the car and back, running into family or friends from high school, even adding in time to relieve himself in the outhouse or the woods, the longest explainable amount of time she can come up with is an hour. It’s been almost two.

  They’d arrived after six o’clock for a picnic dinner she had spent yesterday afternoon and this morning preparing. The cooler Floyd carried was filled with beer for him, ginger ale for Jackie, and jars of strained applesauce and pears for Amy. Jackie didn’t normally drink much, but she was being especially vigilant now that she was pregnant again. She hadn’t told Floyd yet because she wanted to be certain and her appointment with the doctor was still a week away. But she knows. All the signs are there. Her breasts were extremely sensitive again for the first time since she was pregnant with Amy and for the last three weeks she’d teetered on the brink of vomiting every day. She is teetering now. The wind has shifted and seems to be blowing directly from the picnic area at the end of the first field. The smell of grilled meats mingling with the sulfur smoke of cheap firecrackers pushes her over the edge and she vomits less than a foot from where Amy sleeps. She’s mortified and as she wipes her face she scans the field to see if anyone has seen. Jackie had insisted they sit at the far edge of the field, so Amy could sleep in the shade, and to be as far away as possible from the noisy families swarming the barbecue pits. There are a few scattered couples and one family more than half the length of the field away, so she’s hopeful no one saw. She then worries Floyd will see the mess when he comes back and start asking questions, maybe even guess that she’s pregnant, so she stands and rubs it into the grass with her tennis shoe, and to make sure there is no trace, she removes everything from the blanket—the cooler, the food, her bags, Amy—and tugs the blanket back far enough to cover up the damp grass. She then carefully reassembles the picnic as it was, and waits.

  It is after eight when she slowly begins to pack Amy’s bottle and blue rattle into a bag. She carries the Tupperware with watermelon, the cherry pie, and the basket with the rest of the food and utensils and plates and napkins and puts them all in a neat pile in the grass. She folds the blanket and tucks it under the arm she’s using to hold Amy. In her other arm she carries the bag that holds Amy’s things. She leaves the cooler behind.

  The sun is behind the treetops by the time she makes her way to the end of the parking lot where Floyd parked. The sky is every shade of blue, darkening toward black. She is nearly to the car when she sees the yellow convertible. Next to it, on the ground, is the pink diaper bag.

  For the second time that day, she vomits. She’s eaten very little since breakfast, none of which has stayed down, so with Amy still in her arms she heaves toward the cracked asphalt but nothing comes out. She wretches violently and begins to panic that in the absence of food in her belly she will vomit the child just beginning to grow inside
her. She knows this is ludicrous, but the more powerfully her abdomen and esophagus contract the more convinced she becomes. She forces herself to stand. She steadies as her body calms and she wipes with her free hand the drizzle of bile that has spilled down her lip and chin. Amy is crying now and yet she can’t stop staring at the yellow car. Her eyes jump from the wheel well to the license plate to the diaper bag to the jug of tea. None of these things belong together; they are so at odds with her sense of order and place that she drops to one knee fearful she will lose her balance. Amy is squirming in her arm, her screams furious. She has not had her diaper changed in over an hour, and the consequences are now joining the nearby smells that upset Jackie’s stomach earlier. She grabs the bag on the ground next to her and struggles to stand.

  On the drive home, Jackie remembers the morning years ago at Floyd’s family’s farm—his blue shirt, the yellow car she’d convinced herself was not Dana’s flashing onto the road behind the green barn.

  Of course she’d wanted to conquer Floyd. He was something money couldn’t buy and he was Jackie’s. As children, Dana hadn’t been competitive but she was possessive. She didn’t want to hear about other girls in Wells. At any age she’d known her, Dana managed to always steer what they talked about back to their childhood games—the music they loved and memorized, the TV shows they watched religiously, the Knees, the river stones, the adventures they had in the woods. When they were together she wanted only to be in their world. Anything outside it threatened her. Jackie had noticed all this but it wasn’t clear to her until the night of her prom. The evening had been a disaster. Dana wanted to dance, but only with Jackie. She wanted to have their portrait taken together and she made a spectacle of it. She ignored everyone at their table and if asked a question answered loudly and dramatically and only faced Jackie as she did so. Eventually she hijacked the photographer, who drove her home.